Witcher dev’s Cyberpunk 2077 will finally be revealed “just before” E3 this year

Game publishers and developers tend to play things pretty close to the vest and like to have big reveals. But they also have investors and financial regulations to obey, so the news we’ve been waiting eagerly for slips out through an investor meeting instead of a launch trailer or a website countdown. That’s just what happened with word of Cyberpunk 2077, the next game from CD Projekt Red, the developer of the Witcher games.

During the developer’s Fiscal Year 2017 presentation, president Adam Kicinski said that he’d “terribly” like to say something about the game, but tried to put off saying more. After a bit more pushing, though, he said that we can look forward to hearing about the game just before E3 2018.

Kicinski ended up confirming a few other details, too. Rather than having a bespoke character like Geralt of Witcher fame at the center of the story, you’ll be able to create your character and choose your character class, in the vein of a traditional western RPG like Dragon Age, Divinity: Original Sin, and Skyrim. Kicinski also confirmed that the team is focusing on a story-driven single-player game in the vein of The Witcher 3, right down to a lack of microtransactions and hidden payments.

Pushed for word on multiplayer – and of course questions about whether they’re going to make a ‘battle royale’ style game like Fortnite or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – Kicinski wouldn’t outright deny anything but pushed the focus back to single-player.

Speaking on consoles, he said the team is focused on the more powerful systems like PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One rather than the ultra-portable Switch. Someone even asked if the game might be in development for the next round of game consoles. To that, Kicinski said that the game is “very advanced,” and that CD Projekt Red’s tech is “ready to interface with future generations,” and can take advantage of “future, very powerful” hardware. Considering that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings can still stress out a modern computer pretty well, there’s not a lot to read into there other than that the team’s game will have all the hottest bells and whistles in PC games today.

With companies like Remedy (Alan Wake, Quantum Break) already working on using Nvidia and Microsoft’s recently-announced raytracing tech, it wouldn’t be too surprising if Kicinski is hinting at something like that, too, though that’s purely speculation on my part.

Kicinski didn’t say much, but he said enough. We know when we’re going to hear about Cyberpunk 2077 and we have new confirmation that it’ll be a big, beefy single-player game. We’re looking forward to E3 now more than ever.